3GPP LTE and LTE-Advanced, also known as the evolution standard of the great success of GSM/HSPA technology, is aiming at creating a new series of specifications for the new evolving radio-access technology. One of its goals is to go on improving the communication system performance, such as the higher throughput. LTE has two different duplex modes for separating the transmission directions from the user to the base station and back: Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) and Time Division Duplex (TDD). In a TDD mode, a single bandwidth is shared between uplink (UL) and downlink (DL), with the sharing being performed by allotting different periods of time to uplink and downlink. In LTE TDD system, there are seven different patterns of uplink/downlink switching, termed uplink-downlink configurations 0 through 6. LTE TDD system allows for asymmetric UL-DL allocations by the seven different uplink-downlink configurations. LTE TDD system statically or semi-statically allocates the UL-DL configuration among cells. Generally, all the neighboring cells have the same uplink-downlink configuration, e.g., configuration 0, after configurations of the cells are deployed by the LTE TDD system. The configuration allocation is not changed during operation (static allocation) or is changed after years of operation (semi-static allocation).
In some scenarios, the static or semi-static allocation may not match the burst traffic conditions, e.g., the FTP traffic. Hence, there is a need to dynamically adjust the applied UL-DL configuration to match the traffic conditions better.
However, in practice, it is unclear how to efficiently and effectively adjust the UL-DL configuration according to the traffic conditions.